City of Women

During a train ride across the country, Snàporaz, a well-bred fifty-year-old man, wakes up and has a brief fling with a beautiful woman in the restroom. The train suddenly stops and the woman gets off. Snàporaz follows her into the wood, through the wilderness and into a Grand Hotel Miramare, where a lot of women attend a surrealist feminist convention. While Snàporaz – who’s taken for a journalist - is searching for the mysterious lady, he is attacked by the feminists. Donatella, a girl who’s riding her roller skates, offers her assistance. Dazed, Snàporaz makes his exit down a flight of stairs, falling down and badly hurting himself, and then meets a burly woman tending to the hotel's furnace. The woman is taking a shower and says she’ll take him to the train station by motorbike but, as soon as they are in the countryside, she tries to rape him. Snàporaz escapes and is chased by furious women. He finds shelter in Dr. Xavier Katzone’s castle. He’s one of his former school-mates who is celebrating his career as a womanizer. It is in this party that Snàporaz comes across his ex-wife, who insults him, and meets Donatella, the roller skater, again. After having revisited his childhood crushes (a sitter, a nurse, a prostitute), he is caught by the feminists and brought before a court. He climbs on a ladder and into a hot air balloon having Donatella’s shape. Donatella herself fires a machine-gun at him, and the balloon bursts. Snàporaz then wakes up, and he’s on the very same train he’s been in at the beginning of the film, and is sitting in front of his wife. The train then races into a tunnel and closing credits appear.

Awards

1980

Silver Ribbon Best Director: Federico Fellini

Silver Ribbon for Best Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno

Silver Ribbon for Best Costume Design: Gabriella Pescucci

Peculiarites

"Although I have always been interested in dreams, only Citttà delle donne - out of all my films - has almost entirely been like a dream. Everything in the film has a hidden subjective meaning, as in a dream, except the beginning and end, when Snaporaz wakes up in the railway coach. It's the nightmare aspect of Guido's dream in 8 ½."

Reviews

Tullio Kezich

More anguished than amused, Fellini goes back to Amarcord paths and is increasingly disillusioned by man’s role in contemporary world. He declares the film is limited to his autobiography - even though it is dilated - and he does not discover mankind’s ‘primitive big dreams’ theorized by Jung.

Fellini is aging (…) , he has reached his splendid maturity and is pleased, as a Cinema Master, to show us his masterpieces. It’s a festival of images and colours, and the viewers are pleased as, in a way, they feel they are part of the film. We follow his inventions and we are amazed by every shot (as if we were children discovering cinema). If in La città delle donne there is no story-based suspense, images and movie-set inventions do surprise us.

“La Notte”, Milano, 29 March 1980

Gian Luigi Rondi

It is a fairy tale that Fellini was amused to tell (the audience) while recalling all the different steps of his own cinema. He went back to Otto e mezzo and Amarcord’s memories or talked about his time, as in La Dolce Vita and Prova d’orchestra, alternating nightmares and dreams, visions, jokes and anecdotes, multiplying and varying languages and techniques, rediscovering imagined and real traits with plenty of flair and imagination. Consequently, we are fascinated and amazed.

“Il Tempo”, Roma, 29 March 1980

Angelo Solmi

La città delle donne (…) is the most imaginative and wild film by Fellini, but this doesn’t mean it is the best one. Some parts are repeated, even though they are enlarged and refined, and there are some of Fellini’s recurring themes (Rimini, the funfair). However, you cannot easily get bored when watching this film, but you can rather fully enjoy it.

“Oggi”, 18 April 1980

Domenico Meccoli

‘What kind of movie is this?’ This is the question Snaporaz-Fellini asks himself at a given point of the story. We reply to this question as follows: despite some excessively figurative scenes, La città delle donne is a great movie, where on top of metaphors – both women and human beings in general are heavily criticized - some components of Fellini’s great talent fully emerge: La Dolce Vita’s mythological inspiration, Giulietta degli Spiriti’s magic thrill, Amarcord’s nostalgia, Otto e mezzo’s fairy ambiguity.